Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Happy Origin of Species Day


Today is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. I will be celebrating by listening to the Darwin Song Project (available on iTunes) and reading some of the more stirring passages of Darwin's unexpectedly lucid prose:


Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

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